Improving weekend handover between junior doctors on medical and surgical wards.

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Authors
Bethune, Rob
Campbell, Kate
Rose, Alex
Wassall, Richard
Price, Catherine
Siese, Thomas
Finn, Roisin
Whitaker, Sean
Journal
BMJ quality improvement reports
Type
Journal Article
Publisher
BMJ
Rights
Archived with thanks to BMJ Quality Improvement Reports. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode
Poor weekend handover has been implicated as one of the causes of observed higher mortality rates at weekends in UK hospitals. In a large teaching hospital we, a group of junior doctors, set about improving the quality and effectiveness of weekend handover. We used the Model for Improvement to implement a weekend handover sticker through an iterative process using multiple Plan/Do/Study/Act (PDSA) cycles. Over the 16 week study period the number of completed weekend tasks increased by 30% and the number of patients with a documented weekend handover increased by nearly 50%. Junior doctors are well positioned to notice the quality and safety shortcomings within hospitals, and by using effective improvement methods they can improve these systems at little or no cost.
Citation
Improving weekend handover between junior doctors on medical and surgical wards. 2014, 2 (2): BMJ Qual Improv Rep
Note
This article is freely available via Open Access. Click on the 'Additional Link' above to access the full-text from the publisher's site.